Glossary

anhedonia the inability to feel what is normally deemed as pleasurable.

depression a type of mood disorder, characterized by pervasively low mood, low
self-esteem and loss of pleasure, as well as disturbed appetite and sleep.
hypersomnia a condition in which the patient experiences sleepiness throughout the
day, often in lengthy intervals. Can be primary, existing in itself, or secondary to a preexisting condition (e.g. depression).
non-suicidal self-injury the patient causing harm to his or her own body, without
intentions socially sanctioned nor suicidal.

What transpired in our past relationships is outside our control, but the plot will
continue to unfurl, characters will continue to develop. We may or may not choose to
bury our history, punctuated with all manner of past relationships, ending in inevitable
drift, else by slights or misunderstandings.
*
My younger years betray what I stand for today. There was a bandwagon of sorts
that made saying the R-word acceptable in the fourth grade, especially as that Black
Eyed Peas song blared on Philippine radio. They later changed the title from Let's Get
Retarded to Let's Get it Started, but the damage had been done as the original version
crept up charts.
The derogatory term hung over the head of an unfortunate classmate of mine,
who was in academic trouble; because of that, she was altogether avoided in
groupworks. A short-haired hyperactive classmate, on the other hand, was called
autistic and a tomboy. Looking back, verbal bullying perpetuated the stigma with
regards to mental illness, although nobody did anything about it. After all, it's in our
nature to condemn that which is not like us. You can't expect any sympathy in an allgirls school, to begin with.
*
The field of psychiatry has always had a knack for contention, especially with its
morally ambiguous history of maltreatment in asylums, built not for patient-centered
care, but for lifelong incarceration. Its come a long way from that, from merely being a
means of keeping the mad off the streets. We now have a myriad of pharmacological
treatment plans, and scientific proof that what causes madness is not demons, nor evil
spirits, nor imbalances measured in bile and phlegm.
The context (and how we arrived at this discussion during sixth grade homeroom
period, of all places) is now lost to me, but our homeroom teacher would talk about her
brother spending his days sleeping, and when asked by his family why he wouldn't get
up, his only response was: because there's nothing to live for, anyway. She would say
this with an expression of disgust, betraying a glimpse of the already-solidified belief in
their family that depression is an inherent characteristic brought about by laziness, the
inability of a person to give a shit enough.
*
Come middle school, I became known as the nervous kid, the fast talker, mocked
for my fidgety mannerisms and tendency to tremble during recitations. In the seventh
grade honors assembly, missing the honor roll by a point rendered me sobbing
uncontrollably in the bathroom; I whittled at my thin, pale wrists with a metal nail file
all it took to get me hooked to the self-harming urges I carried with me for a decade
more.
Wrist-cutting became an epidemic in Western countries at some point in my first
year of high schoolgiving me, a troubled teen with internet access, a twisted means of

justifying my behavior.
Self-mutilation became interpreted as a twisted trend among the less popular
strata in the student body. Harming one's own body countered natural survival instinct,
although the weirdos who engaged in it only went so far as to inflict superficial damage
to the skin. One girl even took to carving her ex's initials on her arm during lunchtime. It
reached a point that nobody cared enough about these episodes, dismissing those who
engaged in them as attention-hungry. I was, at some point, jeered at with hurtful words
such as loser and slasher, by former friends whom I confided my shameful secret in.
*
My mother once went home from a parent-teacher conference with the
information that I was my English teachers first choice for participation in an interschool writing competition,
But we didnt pick her because she might get nervous during the contest. We
noticed that she doesnt do well under pressure.
Friendless; lacking confidence; disguising full-blown panic attacks as
stomachaches; crying in the middle of presentations, I stumbled out of high school with
a goodie bag full of terrible coping mechanisms.
In retrospect, I can't help but ask: wasn't anybody concerned? Maybe. But
befriending a loser-slasher would make them weirdos, too.

anxiety disorder a group of disorders characterized by apprehension over

anticipated problems.
bipolar disorder a type of mood disorder that involves at least one manic or
hypomanic episode.
manic episode (1) a state of intense elation or irritability, (2) a symptom of bipolar I
disorder, in which the patient is euphoric, talkative, sometimes agitated, hyperexcitable, with flights of ideas and speech.

It seems silly to believe that people simply pass through: that people in a premedical track will have studied just to plow through patient after patient without
thinking of the human element in their future profession. That the people we study, with
their differing personalities and neuronal pathways are just course requirements.
*
I knew R in my freshman year of college. She was a natural performer, bagging
the lead role in her theater organization's newbie production in spite of her lack of
experience. We used to share classes together. She was quiet, save for the few times she
would recite, soft-spoken and uptight, unlike the voice of the leading lady she portrayed,
resonant in a mini-theater even without a microphone. Despite living in an on-campus
dorm, R was always late, which my blockmates and I originally attributed to rehearsals.
She once told me of her anxieties about going to class, but I did not quite know how best
to handle the revelation. The attempt at empathy turned into invalidation.
I totally get anxiety over school, especially during recitation. I mean, who
doesn't?
I was not well-equipped to handle her nuances, and I regret not truly listening to
her then. She beckoned the following semester with alarming avoidance of her classes.
Come second year, she stopped going to school altogether.
*
One semester in my senior year felt as though it were entirely devoted to the
study of bipolar disorder, as though to atone for my past mistakes. I doing a case study
on a woman afflicted with bipolar II disorder, as well as conducting research with a
family who had been gracious enough to share their experiences handling their
daughters bipolar I disorder. I was in awe of their daughters relationship against all
odds; she and her girlfriend both have mental health problems, and yet have been living
together for months. Ive seen the way they look at each othertheir eyes seem to be in
unsaid agreement, I want to grow with you for years to come.
If only I had known then what I know now about bipolar disorder, perhaps I
could have kept some friendships.
H was my classmate in one of my sophomore literature classes. There was
something about herher chattiness, high energy levels and inability to stop laughing
made me feel at ease with her. She was interesting, easy to be with and delightfully
chatty, albeit only to a select group of friends.
We very quickly became comfortable with one another, our exchange of messages
digressing from schoolwork, traipsing towards our favorite musicians, and landing
inevitably on our personal lives. Stories of childhood became increasingly and
unsettlingly punctuated by traumatic events.
Perhaps there is such a thing as too comfortable, because this led to alarming
breakdowns online, from both parties. Prior to H, I didnt have friends to confide in to
that extent, but she made me feel affirmed. I looked at her like the big sister I never had,

but seemed to need more than ever. However, there came a helplessness when it came
to handling her breakdowns. I couldn't quite understand her flights of fancy, her
spouting off of conspiracy theories one day, and then her morose quiet the next.
I couldn't have handled the reality of her experience then. Misunderstandings
riddled our friendship; just as quickly as our foundations were laid out, did they come
toppling down. I immaturely went on tirades, ranting my lungs out in contempt and
attempts at emotional catharsisif the big sister was the problem, then who better to
turn to than our mutual friends? What kind of friend would make such rash judgments
about our friendship? Who even religiously follows the MBTI? What the fuck.
I should have been more level-headed, more understanding of Hs plight.
Naturally, my emotionally-charged rants reached her, sending her out of my life and
dissuading mutual friends from wanting to have anything to do with me.
I didn't have a handle on my own emotions thenwhich explains why I handled
the emotions of others so poorly.
Come third year, I found myself impaired in so many ways. Juggling the rigor of
statistics, chemistry and physiology in one semester, the anxiety I always felt creeping
up on me had reached its peakthis was nothing like my literature classes in the past.
Fear and a general sense of disenchantment made getting through tests, reciting in class
and eventually even getting out of bed challenges in themselves. At some point, my
chemistry grade dipped to an F levelwhich my friend whispered in my ear out of
concern, recalling the bright red 60-something class standing he had seen on the record.
My body did a series of alarming things in response to the news: my chest felt a sharp
blow, my breaths heaved and my eyes watered as he told me I could still do something
about it. I could only imagine how pallid my face was as I quietly excused myself,
spending the rest of my break in a bathroom cubicle, waiting for my breathing to
normalize until my next class.
I passed the class in the end, but in that moment, I felt like my life, and only my
life stopped. I experienced the cubicle frozen in solipsistic slow-motion, feeling feverish
chills, while everything outsideother users of the ladies' bathroom, students, friends,
opportunitiesdarted past, a school of fish impossible to catch, taunting me through
clear water but just out of reach.

comorbidity the coexistence of two or more distinct disorders in the patient.

generalized anxiety disorder an anxiety disorder characterized by chronic and
needless worrying, interfering with normal functioning.
level of insight a normally scale-based evaluation of the patients awareness of the
illness, measured in a mental status examination.

Come on. You're a psych major,

N would say of my irrational streams of thought, some of which that include me
refusing to take my Lexapro, wanting to punish myself and planning elaborate suicides.
Never would I have guessed that my field of study would permeate my life in this way.
I blamed myself for getting into a relationship, knowing that I was being
inconsiderate, just being my emotionally unstable self with someone I cared for. N did
not deserve the caustic interactions that came with being romantically involved with me;
he did not cause any of this, after all. The last person I wanted involved in my unsavory
history is the one I imagine a future with.
I've been told on more than one occasion that I make others feel like emotional
crutches, my real persona being too much to beara cross to the top to a mountain,
carried by my no less than my struggling loved ones, buckling at the knees.
I started seeing a therapist in 2014. I didn't want to subscribe to the clich of
splaying myself onto the couch, like in movies. The mental image is usually that of a
bespectacled man, stroking his beard, coaxing the neuroses out of sleepy-eyed patients
in an iconic chaise lounge; reality had me propped up on a modern leatherette couch,
dry-mouthed, spine straightened like a puppet pulled by the head, sitting across a petite
mestiza woman jotting vigorously on her clipboard. There I would be, beside clinicalwhite fiberglass decorations and a venti Americano beside a neat stack of psychiatry
books, paring away at each layer of my unreliable memory. Each recollection, each
restatement felt less and less like a part of me. The memories laid out there in a
narrative fell flatly onto my lap, stopped being a part of the impermeable tangle that
plagued my mind.
The diagnosis didn't come as a complete surprise, although it did bring a great
deal of closure to finally know the names of my demons: Major Depression, comorbid
with Generalized Anxiety. This marriage wasn't particularly uncommon, and they
weren't completely foreign terms to my lexicon, especially since I had already taken
abnormal psych.
N knew all of this, too. He was my coursemate, which afforded him extraordinary
levels of patience when it came to dealing with me. He once cradled me as I bawled my
eyes out in the middle of an empty classroom, mascara staining his plaid shirtafter
which, he held my hand and walked me slowly to my car, choosing a route with the least
possible people to bump into. Compassionate as he was, this was helped by the fact that
he had his own share of depressive episodes from time to time. This similitude helped
us, but only to an extent.
Some days, he would grow distant and irrational, questioning how much he
deserves to be in a relationship, feeling the weight of his shortcomings hundreds of
times more than they actually are.
It's a given that we had different patterns of ruminationbut we both identified
with the same dwindling satisfaction, the same untrust, only with different
manifestations. Some days I can't even control the flagellation done by my mind, what

with the fuel anxiety gives them to be even more pervasive, intrusive and enduring.
*
Apart from all the blatant labelling, singling out and downright invalidation, its
easy to romanticize mental illness, to equate madness with some sort of intellectual
eccentricity, what with the seemingly endless list of artists who were plagued with mood
disorders, schizophrenia and the like. Its also easy to dismiss one's faults as part and
parcel of mental illness. This seems to be one of the follies of modern psychiatry: the
over-pathologizing of what could simply be individual idiosyncrasies. Internet
communities have taken this to the extreme and turned self-diagnosis into a trend of
sortsturning serious illnesses into excuses for ones behavior, else parts of ones
identity. This is exactly the opposite of what I want for myself.
I do not need to stay in a padded room, nor is my case severe enough to require
hospitalization. I am not bonkers, I am not possessed by evil spirits, exercise will not
cure this. Where does illness end? More importantly, where do I begin?

cognitive distortion irrational thoughts and misperceptions of reality that impede

decision-making skills.
major depressive disorder characterized by pervasive low mood, low self-esteem
and loss of pleasure in activities originally deemed pleasurable. The patient must not be
influenced by existing conditions or life events (e.g. thyroid imbalance or recent death)
to qualify for the diagnosis.
rumination theory compulsive attention to the symptoms and causes of distress, as
opposed to finding solutions for them. The unproductive cognitive style of rumination
tends to cause even more distress.

N and I agreed to meet at the South Wing of the hospital, outside his
psychiatrists clinic. As I waited, I found myself deleting bookmarked articles on my
phone about coping with a depressed partner, saying with finality, this is it. Seventeen
months of trying to understand each other was coming to its denouement.
He had paid for this particular session to include us both, so that his therapist
could hear from both sides of the relationship individually. As we acknowledged
memory after memory, it became clear that the friction from our individual issues and
particular events weathered away at our relationship. There comes a certain acceptance,
and even relief when one accepts that something is beyond repair.
You know how people say, I am going through a breakup? It doesn't just
involve turning off a screen, or popping out a movie tape. I had wished for it to be as
painless, but an entire odyssey was made of it, going through what feels like 10 years'
worth of sorrow, grief and rage in the span of a couple of months. An entire plethora of
human emotion had been stirred from its depths. In that moment, we walked away from
the ruins we tried so desperately to pass off as home.
*
Real stories and real lives make fields of study so much more than dense lists of
jargon, or isolated case studies gathering dust on a shelf. What a tragedy it is to pass
through all of that and learn nothing from it.